Contents

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Dedication

To Dylan, Jacob, and Madz

Epigraph

“Classic.” A book people praise and don’t read.

– MARK TWAIN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Ulysses

Moby Dick

War and Peace

Beowulf

Oliver Twist

Walden

Macbeth

Brave New World

In Search of Lost Time

The Sun also Rises

Naked Lunch

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Brothers Karamazov

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Catcher in the Rye

The Faerie Queen

Animal Farm

Pride and Prejudice

The Odyssey

The Iliad

Don Quixote

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

Heart of Darkness

The Republic

Wuthering Heights

Robinson Crusoe

The Pearl

The Grapes of Wrath

A Farewell to Arms

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Othello

On the Road

The Canterbury Tales

The Divine Comedy: Inferno

Peter Pan

Treasure Island

Frankenstein

Gulliver’s Travels

1984

Great Expectations

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Aeneid

The Return of the Native

Sense and Sensibility

The Trial

Emma

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

The Great Gatsby

King Lear

Ivanov

The Crucible

Ethan Frome

Anna Karenina

Jane Eyre

Twelfth Night

The Da Vinci Code

Romeo and Juliet

The Mysteries of Udolpho

The Scarlet Letter

Little Women

The Pilgrim’s Progress

Madame Bovary

The Stranger

To the Lighthouse

The Metamorphosis

Waiting for Godot

Hamlet

Of Mice and Men

Lolita

The Fountainhead

Oedipus Rex

The Handmaid’s Tale

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Richard III

Paradise Lost

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Waste Land

The Red Badge of Courage

Tarzan of the Apes

The Bell Jar

Moll Flanders

The Three Musketeers

Charlotte’s Web

Julius Caesar

Candide

The Prince

The Jungle Book

The Raven

Lord of the Flies

Anne of Green Gables

The Old Man and the Sea

Tom Jones

Mrs. Dalloway

Fahrenheit 451

Tropic of Cancer

Life of Pi

The Bible

Acknowledgments

Index by Book

Index by Author

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Ulysses

James Joyce

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Dublin, something, something, something, run-on sentence.

Moby Dick

Herman Melville

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Man vs. whale.

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Whale wins.

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

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Everyone is sad.

It snows.

Beowulf

Unknown

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Hero kills monster.

Blah, blah, blah.

Dragon kills hero.

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

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Orphan wants more.

He doesn’t get it.

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Wait, yes he does.

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

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Man sits outside for two years.

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Nothing happens.

Macbeth

William Shakespeare

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Old ladies convince a guy to ruin Scotland.

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

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Everyone is high.

Nothing gets done.

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

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Smell of cake reminds a guy of stuff.

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Four thousand pages of stuff.

The Sun also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

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Lost generation gets drunk.

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They’re still lost.

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs

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Heroin can really mess you up.

Anyway, here’s an orgy.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

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If looks could kill, they probably will.

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Brothers are very contentious, like their father.

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Also Russia.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

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Kids don’t understand racism.

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Adults don’t either.

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

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Moody teen complains a lot.

He has a red hat.

The Faerie Queen

Edmund Spenser

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“How Not to Be a Jerk” for knights.

Animal Farm

George Orwell

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Four legs good, two legs bad.

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Then four legs bad.

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

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Girl hates wealthy aristocrat.

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Wait, no she doesn’t.

The Odyssey

Homer

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War veteran takes forever to get home, then kills everyone.

The Iliad

Homer

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Not the Odyssey.

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

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Guy attacks windmills.

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Also, he’s mad.

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Murderer feels bad.

Confesses. Goes to jail.

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Feels better.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

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War is crazy, unless you are.

Orr maybe not.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

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Colonialism ruins everything.

Also jungle metaphors.

The Republic

Plato

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A really, really long city council meeting.

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Socrates is there.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

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A sort-of brother and sister fall in love.

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It’s foggy.

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe

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Old-timey Gilligan’s Island.

The Pearl

John Steinbeck

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Owning stuff is problematic.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

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Farming sucks. Road trip!

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Road trip sucks.

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

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There are no winners in war.

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And very few adjectives.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Old sailor kills a bird, then interrupts a wedding.

Othello

William Shakespeare

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A lost hankie ruins everyone’s relationship.

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

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Post-war America is complicated and depressing.

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Booze helps.

The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

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Medieval version of “99 Bottles of Beer.”

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With sex and poop jokes.

The Divine Comedy: Inferno

Dante Alighieri

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All hell breaks loose.

Peter Pan

J. M. Barrie

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Some kids and a crocodile pester an amputee.

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

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Booty hunt goes awry.

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Then it doesn’t.

Then it does. Then it doesn’t.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

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Monsters are people too.

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Pieces of people.

Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift

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Hapless sailor is stranded on different lands inhabited by sociopolitical metaphors.

1984

George Orwell

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Vision of a dystopian future (now called Tuesday).

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

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Poor boy’s benefactor is a crook.

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Old lady is no help at all.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

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Kid takes a trip on a raft.

Hijinks ensue.

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Also slavery.

The Aeneid

Virgil

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Angry gods make guy’s trip to Italy an epic ordeal.

The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy

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Local man comes home and ruins everything.

Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen

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Two sisters catch husbands.

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And one catches a cold.

The Trial

Franz Kafka

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Guy is prosecuted.

No one knows why.

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We don’t know why either.

Emma

Jane Austen

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Busybody badgers everyone to get married.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

J. R. R. Tolkien

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Middle-earth’s epic jewelry return policy.

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Rich, selfish people hang out.

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Something about the American dream.

King Lear

William Shakespeare

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Old king goes mad.

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Everyone dies.

Ivanov

Anton Chekhov

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Guy hates everything.

Gets married. Kills himself.

The Crucible

Arthur Miller

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Hunt for witches turns into a witch hunt.

Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton

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Farmer’s life can’t possibly get any worse.

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Hey, a sled!

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

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Woman has an affair.

Then it ends.

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Then a train.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

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Workplace romance gets fiery.

Twelfth Night

William Shakespeare

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Identity theft and cross-dressing causes confusion and marriage.

The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown

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Things are hidden in art.

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Jesus things.

Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare

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Teen lovers commit suicide.

Wait, no they don’t.

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Okay, now they do.

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Ann Radcliffe

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Gothic Scooby-Doo.

With lots of secret passages, fainting, and punctuation.

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Puritan tale of adultery, mockery, and embroidery.

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott

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Four sisters get married.

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Except Beth.

The Pilgrim’s Progress

John Bunyan

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A guy named Christian walks to Heaven.

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You get the idea.

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

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Bored woman misbehaves, then kills herself.

The Stranger

Albert Camus

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Mother dies. Stranger dies.

Existentialism lives.

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

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Boy wants to visit a lighthouse.

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Ten years later he does.

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

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Guy becomes a giant bug.

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And a metaphor for something.

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

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Still waiting.

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

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Guy with daddy issues mopes and whines about who to kill.

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck

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Two drifters.

Dumb one kills soft things.

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Smart one kills dumbs things.

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

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Boy meets girl.

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Except boy is 37 and girl is 12.

The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand

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Architect-creep does whatever he wants and won’t shut up about it.

Oedipus Rex

Sophocles

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Patricide, incest, and self-mutilation: the play.

The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood

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An oppressive patriarchy controls women’s bodies.

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This book is also about that.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce

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Irish lad is torn between the church and sex.

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So he becomes a writer.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum

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Young girl’s fanciful ordeal over footwear.

Richard III

William Shakespeare

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Jerk kills everyone until he’s king (see also Macbeth).

Paradise Lost

John Milton

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God allows free will.

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Until you mess up.

Then he banishes you.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C. S. Lewis

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A lion eats a witch in a closet.

Some kids watch.

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The lion is Jesus.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Victor Hugo

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Deformed bell-ringer in a deformed society.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

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Guy escapes from jail and kills everyone who put him there.

The Waste Land

T. S. Elliot

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A modernist’s plea for a smarter society.

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In a poem that makes everyone feel stupid.

The Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane

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Young soldier is a hero.

Except he’s not.

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Then he is.

Tarzan of the Apes

Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Ape? Man?

Ape-man!

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

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Young girl tries to fit in.

She doesn’t.

Moll Flanders

Daniel Defoe

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Thief cons everyone.

Repents. Ends up rich.

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Yay?

The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas

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Three guys in big feathery hats have sword fights.

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Another guy shows up.

Charlotte’s Web

E. B. White

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Clever web designer saves a pig.

Julius Caesar

William Shakespeare

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Story of political backstabbing.

With actual stabbing.

Candide

Voltaire

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Life is horrible.

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But gardening is fun!

The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli

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How to win friends and influence people.

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Except with no friends and killing people.

The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling

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Feral boy messes about in the woods then goes home.

The Raven

Edgar Allen Poe

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A bird flies into some guy’s house and annoys him.

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

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Marooned boys are bad at everything.

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Except killing each other.

Anne of Green Gables

Lucy Maud Montgomery

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Redheaded orphan’s antics bother everyone.

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Then they don’t.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

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Senior’s dinner is eaten by sharks.

Tom Jones

Henry Fielding

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Cheeky orphan comes of age.

With silliness and naughty bits.

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

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Party planner’s day ends with, well, a party.

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Also a suicide.

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

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Fireman memorizes books.

People cause problems.

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The world blows up.

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller

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A jerk visits Paris in the 1930s.

Life of Pi

Yann Martel

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Boy is adrift with a tiger.

Or people. Or no one. Or God.

The Bible

Unknown

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Be good or else.

Acknowledgments

To the dictionary for providing the words and to all of the authors who were able to put them in an interesting order.

Index by Book

The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.

–#–

1984, 65

–A–

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 68-69

Aeneid, The, 70

Animal Farm, 30-31

Anna Karenina, 86-87

Anne of Green Gables, 146-147

–B–

Bell Jar, The, 131

Beowulf, 11

Bible, The, 156

Brave New World, 17

Brothers Karamazov, The, 24-25

–C–

Candide, 138-139

Canterbury Tales, The, 56-57

Catch-22, 40

Catcher in the Rye, The, 28

Charlotte’s Web, 136

Count of Monte Cristo, The, 125

Crime and Punishment, 38-39

Crucible, The, 83

–D–

Da Vinci Code, The, 90-91

Divine Comedy: Inferno, The, 58

Don Quixote, 36-37

–E–

Emma, 76

Ethan Frome, 84-85

–F–

Faerie Queen, The, 29

Fahrenheit 451, 152-153

Farewell to Arms, A, 50-51

Fountainhead, The, 112

Frankenstein, 62-63

–G–

Grapes of Wrath, The, 48-49

Great Expectations, 66-67

Great Gatsby, The, 78-79

Gulliver’s Travels, 64

–H–

Hamlet, 107

Handmaid’s Tale, The, 114-115

Heart of Darkness, 41

Hunchback of Notre Dame, The, 124

–I–

Iliad, The, 35

In Search of Lost Time, 18-19

Ivanov, 82

–J–

Jane Eyre, 88

Julius Caesar, 137

Jungle Book, The, 142

–K–

King Lear, 80-81

–L–

Life of Pi, 155

Little Women, 96-97

Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The, 122-123

Lolita, 110-111

Lord of the Flies, 144-145

Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The, 77

–M–

Macbeth, 16

Madame Bovary, 100

Metamorphosis, The, 104-105

Moby Dick, 8-9

Moll Flanders, 132-133

Mrs. Dalloway, 150-151

Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 94

–N–

Naked Lunch, 22

–O–

Odyssey, The, 34

Oedipus Rex, 113

Of Mice and Men, 108-109

Old Man and the Sea, The, 148

Oliver Twist, 12-13

On the Road, 54-55

Othello, 53

–P–

Paradise Lost, 120-121

Pearl, The, 47

Peter Pan, 59

Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 23

Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 98-99

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 116-117

Pride and Prejudice, 32-33

Prince, The, 140-141

–R–

Raven, The, 143

Red Badge of Courage, The, 128-129

Republic, The, 42-43

Return of the Native, The, 71

Richard III, 119

Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The, 52

Robinson Crusoe, 46

Romeo and Juliet, 92-93

–S–

Scarlet Letter, The, 95

Sense and Sensibility, 72-73

Stranger, The, 19

Sun Also Rises, The, 20-21

–T–

Tarzan of the Apes, 130

Three Musketeers, The, 134-135

To Kill a Mockingbird, 26-27

To the Lighthouse, 102-103

Tom Jones, 149

Treasure Island, 60-61

Trial, The, 74-75

Tropic of Cancer, 154

Twelfth Night, 89

–U–

Ulysses, 7

–W–

Waiting for Godot, 106

Walden, 14-15

War and Peace, 10

Waste Land, The, 126-127

Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The, 118

Wuthering Heights, 44-45

Index by Author

The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.

–A–

Alcott, Louisa May, 96-97

Atwood, Margaret, 114-115

Austen, Jane, 32-33, 72-73, 76

–B–

Barrie, J. M., 59

Baum, L. Frank, 118

Beckett, Samuel, 106

Bradbury, Ray, 152-153

Brontë, Charlotte, 88

Brontë, Emily, 44-45

Brown, Dan, 90-91

Bunyan, John, 98-99

Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 130

Burroughs, William S., 22

–C–

Camus, Albert, 101

Cervantes, Miguel de, 36-37

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 56-57

Chekhov, Anton, 82

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52

Conrad, Joseph, 41

Crane, Stephen, 128-129

–D–

Dante, 58

Defoe, Daniel, 46, 132-133

Dickens, Charles, 12-13, 66-67

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 24-25, 38-39

Dumas, Alexandre, 125, 134-135

–E–

Elliot, T. S., 126-127

–F–

Fielding, Henry, 149

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 78-79

Flaubert, Gustave, 100

–G–

Golding, William, 144-145

–H–

Hardy, Thomas, 71

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 95

Heller, Joseph, 40

Hemingway, Ernest, 20-21, 50-51, 148

Homer, 34, 35

Hugo, Victor, 124

Huxley, Aldous, 17

–J–

Joyce, James, 7, 116-117

–K–

Kafka, Franz, 74-75, 104-105

Kerouac, Jack, 54-55

Kipling, Rudyard, 142

–L–

Lee, Harper, 26-27

Lewis, C. S., 122-123

–M–

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 140-141

Martel, Yann, 155

Melville, Herman, 8-9

Miller, Arthur, 83

Miller, Henry, 154

Milton, John, 120-121

Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 146-147

–N–

Nabokov, Vladimir, 110-111

–O–

Orwell, George, 30-31, 65

–P–

Plath, Sylvia, 131

Plato, 42-43

Poe, Edgar Allen, 143

Proust, Marcel, 18-19

–R–

Radcliffe, Ann, 94

Rand, Ayn, 112

–S–

Salinger, J. D., 28

Shakespeare, William, 16, 53, 80-81, 89, 92-93, 107, 119, 137

Shelley, Mary, 62-63

Sophocles, 113

Spenser, Edmund, 29

Steinbeck, John, 47, 48-49, 108-109

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60-61

Swift, Jonathan, 64

–T–

Thoreau, Henry David, 14-15

Tolkien, J. R. R., 77

Tolstoy, Leo, 10, 86-87

Twain, Mark, 68-69

–V–

Virgil, 70

Voltaire, 138-139

–W–

Wharton, Edith, 84-85

White, E. B., 136

Wilde, Oscar, 23

Woolf, Virginia, 102-103, 150-151

About the Author

JOHN ATKINSON lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is a voracious reader of cereal boxes, microwave instructions, and subtext. John is plagued by a recurring dream where he misses the Renaissance because of car trouble. He also claims to have coined the phrase, “I had a banana on the train,” which everyone tells him isn’t really an expression.

John’s cartoon Wrong Hands has been featured in numerous online and print publications worldwide and can be seen regularly in Time magazine. www.wronghands1.com

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Copyright

ABRIDGED CLASSICS. Copyright © 2018 by John Atkinson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Digital Edition JUNE 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-274786-0

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